Talk-Polywell.org

Dr Park is speaking at the University of Maryland on September 9th 2014 with the title "Measurement of Enhanced Confinement at High Pressure Magnetic Cusp System".

Abstract: The issue of plasma confinement in a cusp geometry dates back to the late 1950s, when Harold Grad Harold Grad and his team at New Your University conjectured (and to some extent calculated) that the confinement properties of a magnetic cusp would be dramatically improved if the confined plasma had sufficiently high pressure to exclude the B-field from the interior. Achieving high beta in a cusp proved very difficult. An experiment carried by Park and his group is the first one in 56 years, to demonstrate the increase in. confinement experimentally. The implications of this result are profound in that It can lead to electrostatic confinement fusion and break-even using aneutronic reactions such as p-B11.

As a background I should note that the experiments were conducted by small company a company EMC2 in San Diego with approximately -15M Navy funding. The objective was the development of a small aneutronic fusion propulsion reactor for ship and submarine propulsion. Although the program was not classified the Navy did not allow public release of the information till last month. I followed the program because I was a member of a 5 people committee that provided biannual input to the Navy as to its progress. A breakthrough demonstration happened approximately 6 month ago and they finally got permission to publish and present the results. A preprint can be found in http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133
When: Tue, September 9, 2014 - 4:00pm
Where: Lobby of the Physical Sciences Complex

http://umdphysics.umd.edu/index.php/eve ... inars.html

I posted this in another thread, but it kind of got lost because of topic drift.

Dang, and I'll be out of town! What are the odds?

"A breakthrough demonstration happened approximately 6 month ago and they finally got permission to publish and present the results."

So can we finally say that bussard's claims were verified? Are we finally down to just engineering isues?

Thanks for the news. I will spread this around....

zbarlici wrote:"A breakthrough demonstration happened approximately 6 month ago and they finally got permission to publish and present the results."

So can we finally say that bussard's claims were verified? Are we finally down to just engineering isues?

There are a couple of threads here discussing the paper this talk seems to be about. In a nutshell, they built a small machine specifically to find out what it takes to actually form a "wiffleball" diamagnetic condition. They showed that the early simulations were off and you have to initially bang the plasma about 10x harder, but a wiffleball does indeed form.

Its a needed step to making a larger, fusion-capable machine create wiffleballs, without which they might have foundered around for years. But is not the ultimate proof the concept will work. It does makes me smile.

I wish we'd had Dr. Park running the lab in 1999.

This has been the longest friggin' 7 years ever.... and it seems to still be dragging on If this keeps up, not even poly viagra will work.

edit: maybe i should calrify.. nothing will work trying to raise enthusiasm

That explains why the U. of Maryland is hosting a talk. One of the reviewers is based there.

http://www.umerc.umd.edu/projects/plasma-physics

Dan Tibbets

From what I've heard, Dr. Park is talking at all the schools with big plasma groups. I actually missed his talk at LANL.

There's a chance I may be able to do polywell research. A source said if you want to do important physics, you pretty much have to do 1m x 1m; this will be very difficult for me.

It would be nice to hear a report of the seminar if someone from Talk-Polywell did attend.

The slides from Dr Parks seminar are available at http://www.physics.umd.edu/jaeyoung_park_slides.pdf.
They complement nicely the arXiv preprint with more details. Enjoy!

crowberry wrote:The slides from Dr Parks seminar are available at http://www.physics.umd.edu/jaeyoung_park_slides.pdf.
They complement nicely the arXiv preprint with more details. Enjoy!

Very cool! Thanks crowberry!

So much for operating under a gag.

Let's see, what didn't they reveal? Did they use plate nuts or conventional hex nuts on their CF flanges?

Well Tom, I am glad he is putting it out in the wild now. I have told him that visibility is his friend.
Must be that the patents are fully in, so he is willing to share now.

Ooops, I guess I let the cat out of the bag a bit.
Is this the part where I admit that I have touched WB7, WB8, and Mini-B?

The revelation that Mini B achieved a calculated(?) Beta of 0.7 is enlightening. I wondered about the B field exclusion of ~ 15% and if it was because of the measuring loop being outside the wiffleball border, etc. This better defines the conditions. It also raises the question of the "sharp border" at high Beta. How close to Beta=1 is needed for the sharp border to dominate electron motions- turn around. The fusion output potential is further revealed also. Apparently, expected density scales linearly with Beta. A Beta= 1 would have a density 1/0.7 greater and fusion yield may be that squared or ~ twice as great. Compared to a Tokamak with a Beta of perhaps 0.03 gives a fusion rate ~ 0.0009 per unit of volume. This is consistant with the claimed density differential of ~ 10^19 to 10^20 particles per meter cubed for a Tokamak and ~ 10^22 for a Polywell. The resultant fusion yield is ~ 10,000 times greater per unit of volume. This is again consistent with the estimate of ~62,000 greater power density for a Polywell over a Tokamak.

This assumes similar internal plasma conditions other than density. Temperature, thermal spread, and non ion confluence areassumed to be the same. It serves as a comparison of the Beta to machine performance. Any improvement to Beta- even modest gains, in a Tokamak are significant. The problem is that the edge / macro instabilities become more difficult to control with increasing Beta in Tokamaks. This illustrates another attractive feature of Polywells , the stable magnetic field surfaces due to convexity towards the plasma. The sharp border at high Beta refines the distribution of the plasma to the B fields. In a magnatized plasma it is difficult to define where the plasma is in relation to the B field lines- it is on both sides with a gradual gradient. In the Wiffleball condition in a Polywell there is no such ambiguity. Note that electron ExB diffusion is not eliminated, but it becomes much less contributory to the description of the plasma distribution, for the electrons and indirectly for the ions also (due to the potential well ideally confining the ions to the interior of the Wiffleball).


Dan Tibbets

ladajo wrote: Is this the part where I admit that I have touched WB7, WB8, and Mini-B?

I myself did NOT touch Mini-8 when I saw it. They were setting it up for a shot and I kept my distance.